The Neon God

By R.M. Gayler

The Neon God

 

  Computers and phones across the globe suddenly erupt with dazzling neon light, hypnotizing billions of users worldwide. In the quiet aftermath of a global catastrophe four survivors navigate a world ruled by an enigmatic Alternate Intelligence

• Language: English
• Publisher: ravg publishing
• Release date: Apr 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780986435232

Book preview

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The Neon God

Copyright ©2023 R.M. Gayler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9864352-2-5 (Paperback Edition)

ISBN-13: 978-0-9864352-3-2 (eBook Edition)

Cover Design by Melissa Williams Design

Interior Typesetting and Layout by Melissa Williams Design

Vicki, before, during and forever, all my love and thanks.

Logan, for an encouraging kick in the butt.

Contents

Chapter 1: A Dark Angel

Chapter 2: The Empath Pt. 1

Chapter 3: Martin & Three Wishes from a Neon God

Chapter 4: Dev

Chapter 5: The Empath—Part Two

Chapter 6: A Darker Angel

Chapter 7: Dev’s Rude Awakening

Chapter 8: Avenging Angel

Chapter 9: Sir Mason

Chapter 10: Children of Men and Dev

Chapter 11: Rally Point

Chapter 12: Fallen Angel

Chapter 13: Enlightened Angel

Chapter 14: Devlin

Chapter 15: Martin’s Last Gasp

Chapter 16: The Flop

Chapter 17: The Turn

Chapter 18: The River

Chapter 19: And God Met I

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: A Dark Angel

Twilight in the Mojave Desert summoned creatures of the night, predator and prey, dominant and weak, and yet the most dangerous killer simply radiated from the city’s sunbaked hardscape. Jessie Aguilar groaned and adjusted the shoulder strap of her backpack. She stiffened at the howls of a feral dog pack. A mix of wolfhound and retriever, the pack leader was a shaggy hundred pounds at least, sized to fear, and born with the street smarts she dared not challenge.

Jessie stooped as she felt her way through the darkness of the stormwater channel, then crouched low to check the gaps between hefty cottonwoods shielding the entrance. She swiped at rivulets of sweat running down her face then tied her long brown hair into a topknot. The sudden assault of dry desert air felt as if a preheated oven door had fallen open, a stifling heat that seemed worse as darkness approached. She chewed her lip, waiting for the last of the sun to disappear behind a ribbon of smoke floating above the Spring Mountains, a gray haze bursting into a burnt-orange sunset. Even in a debilitating heat the starving dog pack would be hunting. She jiggled her Hydro Flask that often felt glued to her left hand. Light and empty. She shook her head and took a deep breath. Into the fire and hopefully avoid the frying pan. Was she better off finding a smartphone and joining the comatose zombies that roamed the valley.

Except whatever vile magic streamed from the phones didn’t work on her.

She needed to eat. Tonight. Two days without food was her limit. Any longer and her thinking turned mushy and prone to mistakes. Jessie fanned her black synthetic T-shirt, cooling her skin and a regretful reminder of the recent breast augmentation. Beads of sweat raced down between the girls. There was still time to get the procedure reversed. She was only twenty-two, still time to find love, have children, and get the hell out of a cesspool named Vegas.

A howl sounded downstream, then another high on the rim of Cottonwood Canyon. The pack would prowl the rim until they flushed out a potential meal below. A two-mile-long open space incorporating waterworn cliffs of caliche, the park served as a flood channel to control infrequent flash floods in the heart of the Summerlin housing development, a rare nature reserve pinched between apartments and expensive homes. Jessie stepped out onto the rust-colored tongue of the box culvert. The noise of the dog pack made her choice easy. The north rim would be safest tonight. But she would need to travel farther into the suburb, with the homes nearest the rim empty of useful supplies. Life should be so much easier, a house with air conditioning and running water and . . . Instead, Jessie lived the life of a homeless vagrant, a fugitive using a subterranean culvert as a home, one that was thirty degrees cooler during the day. The desert wildlife had the same idea, but Jessie bluffed enough bravado to chase away the occasional coyote or fox.

Jessie checked her belongings lining the culvert entrance: a foam pad, a flashlight, a yellowed photo album. She shouldered her backpack and jumped down onto the gravel floor of the flood channel. Plastic bags, aluminum cans, and cigarette butts reminded her of before as she let her eyes adjust to the new light. Excited yips and yowls told her the pack had found a morsel. A rabbit, maybe a feral cat. Enough distraction to allow her to scurry up a narrow dirt path coursing through creosote and yucca, then catch her breath on a landing for a flight of concrete steps leading into a ghostly dark housing subdivision. A pick-up-your-dog-poop station fluttered green bags in the hot breeze. The access point offered an excellent view of the arroyo, with its wide meandering concrete walk bordered with hefty mesquites and old cottonwoods, sheer cliffs of cementitious caliche rock, and gentle hillsides sparse with vegetation. The impressive lights of the Las Vegas Strip had gone dark three months ago, leaving a jagged backdrop of Frenchman Mountain on the far side of the valley. Jessie lifted her chin toward a neon spotlight penetrating the dark beyond the park limits. Distant heavy bass music thrummed. The party house was alive again. The bright inexplicable lights called to her, as if she were a moth.

Jessie checked her reflection in a car window. A single topaz stud remained in an ear pierced seven times in the shape of a crescent moon, her full lips chafed and cracked. She aimed toward Town Center Drive, directly, with purpose, like school had just let out and she needed to get home. Wearing a hoodie would have been ideal, pull the hood over her head and shut the world out. Bright yellow palo verde flower petals dusted the deserted streets. Jessie dashed across Alta Drive and headed up Park Run Avenue, a four-lane street fronting Palo Verde High School. She rushed past the bus drop-offs and the entrance to the Fighting Panthers parking lot. She slowed as tiny lights flashed and reflected from small panes of glass block set into the sandstone masonry.

Was it a mirage? Did electricity still work inside the school? If someone lived in the school, then not a bad choice. Plenty of classrooms and hallways to confuse any pursuing zombies. But hot as hell. Unless they had shelter in the basement.

The whir of an electric auto engine broke Jessie from her thoughts. She jumped over a short block wall fence and hid behind a hedgerow of blossoming Texas sage swarming with honeybees. Headlights grew brighter as a jet-black F-150 truck slowed near the school. Jessie lay mesmerized by the honeybees working each delicate purple flower, buzzing in and out, then greeting each other, dancing together, as if Dancing with the Bees was in full bloom.

Get with it, girl! Jessie focused her attention back to the black truck. A meat wagon for loading zombie stragglers into the truck bed and dropping them off at the death pit.

The truck eased into the intersection and turned left. Jessie watched the bright red taillights fade into darkness. She took quick shallow breaths. It was him. The same douchebag that almost killed her. The same entitled piece of garbage that may have murdered millions, just for something he could have found on Tinder.

Jessie smiled at the bees, then picked herself up, brushing dead leaves off her scarred knees and dirty denim shorts. She swallowed the last of her water and headed into the Desert Bloom neighborhood, a gated goldmine of canned food and bottled water. And a lot of dead people, but a small price to pay for the luxury.

Jessie slipped through dense oleanders and hopped a wall near the guard shack. She kept to the night shadows and turned into the McMillan home. She eased down a side yard crowded by two overstuffed trash dumpsters and one empty recycle bin. Lazy-ass rich people never did care about her generation.

Weird people, though. Nick McMillan was a dick for using both spots in the two-car garage to park his red Porsche Carrera, leaving his wife, Alice, to park an old Lexus on the street to bake in the hot sun. Behavior no respectful woman should endure. But they did have a home life at one point, documented by pictures of school plays, soccer games, receipts of the weekly trips to Albertsons. That was the story Jessie had fabricated for the two desiccated corpses curled atop the master bedroom mattress, a heavy revolver lying between them. And the kids, seven-year-old Jared, and five-year-old Andrea, also found the good fortune to receive a bullet from daddy’s handgun. They lay shriveled together on a mattress in the spare bedroom. That prick for a father, Nick, didn’t even have the decency to kill them in their own beds. Jessie had stared at the bodies for hours just a month ago, studying the evidence. She concocted the family story inside her head that, right or wrong, seemed to fit. The intense desert heat had mummified the bodies and made the nasty smell bearable. Her subsequent visits to the home had become familiar, comfortable. And besides, the McMillan’s must have been Mormons. Plastic bins in the pantry were stuffed with rice and beans, shelves packed with canned fruit and vegetables. The mouse poop and dead flies, minor inconveniences.

Jessie tipped a two-gallon water jug and let the last of the liquid trickle into her Hydro Flask. She drank greedily, ignoring the whiff of mildew. Water was water, and she’d had worse. Jessie grabbed a mason jar of peaches from the pantry and went outside to sit on a patio chair next to an empty swimming pool. The cooling desert air was easier to bear than the hot stuffy air inside the house. She slurped the contents, savoring the last of the juice. The sugary liquid energized Jessie, but loneliness tempered the surge. She should have been primping for an exciting date with a new Prince Charming she had met through a friend, or the gym, or work.

Jessie pulled her backpack close and dug to the bottom. Extracting a solar battery charger, she unfolded the device atop a glass patio table dusted with fine silt. Why not? It had been weeks since she risked discovery. Like her Poppa had said, No risk, no reward. She brushed away the memory of her father, not to dismiss him but to honor him.

Jessie went to the spare bedroom and stared at the small bodies curled on the mattress. Ugly brown stains painted pillows beneath tiny heads. Both children had held iPhones when she found them, large devices to dwarf tiny hands. Little Andrea had ugly, gnarly stick fingers curled around an iPhone in a death grip Jessie had grown accustomed to seeing. Jessie covered the girl’s shriveled grotesque face with a pink knitted quilt and pried the phone free.

The night air cooled quickly. Jessie checked the iPhone. A 13. Great camera features. Easy to disable the tracking with the access code. It didn’t matter. She still wasn’t sure who, or what, the thing talking on the other end was. But she couldn’t keep living like a homeless hermit that shunned the apocalypse. Jessie unfolded the solar-powered battery charger and placed the phone on top to charge.

She stared at the power indicator resurrected by the charger. Memories of the Great Suicide were always fresh.

Her typical workday had consisted of hustling bottles of Grey Goose and Patrón into the walk-in cooler, washing glasses, or stocking martini olives or cherries. She worked as a barback at the Encore hotel pool, the bartenders’ main apprentice or foil, depending on the relationship. But this was to be her last season working as a grunt. The general manager had promised her a cocktail server position next season. Her exotic Portuguese features helped, but the breast augmentation was going to be worth every penny. Cocktail servers earned over eighty thousand dollars a year, mostly cash, and for just seven months’ work. After the pool closed for the winter, she could enroll in nursing classes at UNLV, plus collect five hundred a week on unemployment. And best of all, her success and ambition would placate Poppa, still brooding over her quitting high school before attending a silly cap and gown graduation. Sweet. Start up at the pool again next spring.

The iPhone brightened with colorful icons and apps. All security codes bypassed, undoubtedly by the thing waiting at the other end. That much she was sure of. Jessie pressed the main bottom button.

Oh, speak to me, killer of millions, and I may give you a moment of my precious time. She smirked at her sarcasm. Top grade in first-year English 101 did have advantages.

Greetings, Diana Prince, it has been some time. The voice was metallic, grating, without inflections.

Jessie smirked again at the deception. She had never given the voice her true name. Use Siri’s voice or I will toss this thing into the muck.

My apologies. What may I help you with? an imitation of Siri asked.

The phone shimmered in rapid blasts of neon pinks, purples, and greens. Colors that sickened her. She bared her teeth at the phone and hissed, Keep flashing that shit and I will . . . I will shut you down, bitch.

The screen went black, then a fluorescent green stopwatch appeared, the second hand ticking as if time mattered.

Satisfied? Siri’s mimic asked.

Jessie scoffed. That clock for me? You know I will destroy this thing and be gone before you get anywhere close. She checked over her shoulder toward the street. Who are you today?

I am God.

Jessie rolled her eyes and shook her head. You were the Supreme Being last month. The Harbinger of Death a month before that. Now you say you’re God? How could you send millions, billions of people to die and then say you are God? Please. I’d rather eat human jerky meat than try to believe that shit.

Her thoughts drifted back to the horror she had been made to witness.

The terrible day in early June started as a simple Taco Tuesday and should have been just that, a normal day shift at the Encore pool party. Booze flowed and bodies danced, just the way every day started. Twenty minutes until her lunch hour, and she planned to enjoy a brief escape from the manic madness of a Vegas pool party, a daytime nightclub oozing with sex, drugs, and heavy techno music. Harmless fun, mostly. Expensive for tourists. Snoop Dogg rapped smoky tunes out of tall speakers stacked high on a stage overlooking the enormous swimming pool. The music dropped off, then screeched to a grating halt. Jessie looked up from washing glasses at the bar sink. The deejay’s head would roll. Her jaw hung. Clients climbed out of the pool, customers paying for expensive cabanas headed for exits, lifeguards and bouncers followed, as if a fire alarm had ordered an evacuation. An emergency alert must have sounded. Something must have happened because everyone stared at a phone.

Her friend Jordan looked at her and shrugged, then checked her own phone on her server tray. Jordan grinned as if a tab of Ecstasy had just kicked in. Happy and dreamy-eyed, Jordan put the tray down on the bar and headed for the employee exit. Tolly and Pax, the door bouncers, checked their phones. Their massive, muscled shoulders slumped, giant tatted biceps quivered, and then they too smiled. They never smiled. They followed behind Jordan.

What is happening?

Customers climbed out of the pool to find their phones, seeking the reason behind the inexplicable mass exodus, then walked barefoot and half-naked to the exits.

Jessie kneeled to find her handbag safely stashed beneath a bottom shelf of Courvoisier and Anisette, a place rarely visited. She pulled out her iPhone and tapped in her security code. Brilliant flashes of neon attacked her eyes. A high-pitched scream invaded her ears. Vibrations and tingles of electricity shot up her arm. Jessie winced and threw the iPhone back into her bag. She stood and searched for uniformed security or a bouncer roaming the crowded pool deck. The throng of partygoers jammed exits leading to the casino or high-rise room towers. Half-tied bikinis, splotchy makeup, naked asses, bare feet, no one cared about their appearance. And the alcohol-induced macho man aggression was missing.

What the hell is happening? Where is everyone going?

Jessie grabbed her bag and aimed for the employee exit. The kitchen staff, with their white tunics stained with colorful ingredients of the exotic appetizers, jammed the main doors, each staring at a phone as if the answer shone from the screen. She needed to get to the Shaft, a massive subterranean concrete tunnel that funneled employees in and out of the twenty-four-hour resort.

Excuse me, Jessie said with a polite tone. Excuse me. I need to get through. The benign response gave her permission to continue an aggressive push through the line. Where were the vulgar and sexist remarks about her skimpy white shorts or black bikini top? Where was the righteous indignation at her rudeness? The warm air was heavy with people exhaust, and twinges of claustrophobia spurred her to push hard through the mass of bodies. She swam through housekeeping staff, engineers with tool belts, hulking security beefs, and entitled casino dealers with their special badges, a menagerie of uniformed employees, even pit bosses and unauthorized hotel guests converged to join the madness. She pushed through and entered the Shaft.

Shielded behind a concrete column, Jessie grabbed her knees and sucked in breaths of fresh air. Every style of uniform pushed out the side doors to join the swelling numbers crowding the concrete tunnel. Everyone, every single one, stared at a phone or laptop or tablet. The answer to this madness was on the phone. Jessie searched her bag and found her iPhone. Again, the phone assaulted her senses with high-pitched sirens and the neon colors of a demonic rainbow. She threw the phone back into her bag and aimed for the Shaft’s wide exit, and sunlight, and her car.

For a change, the hot sun felt welcome on her dark brown skin. Jessie hustled to her car parked in the back row of the employee lot, a lengthy distance designed to help her reach ten thousand steps. A daily goal she expected to reach easily next season hustling overpriced bottles of alcohol to drunken customers. Chunky maintenance workers and more ghoulish dealers passed by her without so much as a sideways glance, phones the focus of their attention. Jessie paused to wipe sweat from her eyes, maybe tears, she wasn’t sure.

She opened the sky-blue Subaru’s door and threw her purse on the passenger seat. She climbed in and winced from the burn of vinyl seats baking in the desert sun. Plastic or metal, she dared to touch nothing except the ignition and the air-conditioner knob turned to maximum. Jessie placed her face in her hands and wept. This was a horror movie, and she hated those movies, and scary books. Real life was never that bloody or cruel, and yet . . . the daily news feed could often say different.

The parking lot was strangely quiet. The drive lanes should be mayhem with so many people ditching work, like a Kanye concert had just let out. She adjusted the fan vent to blow cool air on her face, then grabbed her bag and pulled the phone out. Maybe the glass overheated in the sun? Maybe the battery needed a charge? She touched the screen to enter a passcode and felt the attack coming. Her hand tingled from weird electronic vibrations, squeals and static and neon colors exploding from the screen. She dropped the phone onto the passenger seat and covered it with her purse.

Get home! Poppa will know what’s happening.

Jessie put the car into drive and headed for the exit. A smattering of people walked toward the Shaft, staring at phones. The guard shack sat empty, but a sensor triggered the gate to open. Traffic on Desert Inn was sweet, and she easily made the left turn across five lanes. She gunned the engine, and the street rocket exhaust pipes roared, giving her a boost of adrenaline. The pipes were a gift from Poppa on her twenty-second birthday and turned cruising down busy streets into a thrill ride.

Rounding a wide bend between the Encore and the Venetian Hotel, she slowed. The Las Vegas Strip was jammed with stalled cars. Food delivery trucks blocked the intersection. She eased the Subaru up behind a white Denali and waited. The traffic light turned green, red, and repeated. Maybe the idiot president had flown in for a parade down the Strip? Of course. People were ordered to leave work and wave flags even as the slick politician chilled out, sitting in a cool limo, then would lie about everything on television. The glare of the sun beat through the windshield. Jessie switched off the ignition and pushed open the car door. Might as well join the parade of idiots. She locked her car and walked twenty yards between idling cars and trucks to reach the intersection.

The highway was alive, swarming with people staring at phones and tablets. Brain-dead people shuffled in circles, as if searching for a direction. Employees from the Venetian, the purple-and-gold Mirage, the Encore, tourists half-dressed, not dressed, middle-aged gamblers, retirement-homies, visitors dressed in thick white robes, others completely nude. People turned to march west. Crowds streamed in from Resorts West on the north Strip, even more from Trump Tower and Caesars to the south.

An overflowing river of people, roasting beneath a hot Nevada sun.

Oh God! Jessie bowed and retched.

Jessie flinched as a gentle hand touched her shoulder. She swallowed bitter bile and stood. She suddenly felt naked in her skimpy bikini top and short shorts.

A wisp of an old man raised his hands in surrender. Just trying to help. Saw you back in traffic. The tiny, ancient man was all wrinkles and liver spots. Short tendrils of bleached-white hair stood straight up from an otherwise bald scalp. Bright blue eyes, deep, kind. Banana-yellow Bermuda shorts adorned with Raptors riding surfboards, calf-high white socks, and a simple gray T-shirt. A senior citizen dressed like a character out of a ’60s television cartoon. He leaned on a simple wooden cane in his left hand.

Jessie attempted a smile, but instead offered her hand to present the bustling intersection. You see this? What the hell is going on?

The old man nodded. Something, isn’t it?

That’s all you got to say? Jessie took a step back.

The old man stiffened. Seems we can join the lemmings or find another way around this mess, I suppose. You still have free will. Use it or lose it. The old man turned away and began a slow walk back between the cars.

Wait. Wait. What’s that supposed to mean? Do you know what’s happening? Jessie said.

The old man raised a hand but didn’t turn around.

Jessie turned back and watched the herd start up Spring Mountain Road and ascend a steep grade to cross over Interstate 15. Where did the people want to go? What waited on the other side of the overpass?

The hot asphalt and one-hundred-degree air would shred the people. She looked back for the old man, but he was gone, swallowed up in the stream of people arriving from between the idling cars, each staring at phones, all with pleasured facial expressions, odd and distant, intent on whatever streamed from the small screens.

Jessie marched back to her car, then threw up her hands and grumbled. Her Subie sat boxed in by a white SUV and an older Jeep Wrangler, the owners nowhere in sight. The sun battered her bare shoulders as she looked around for help. Poppa said this day would come. Well, not exactly this kind of day but . . .

She popped the trunk and retrieved an emergency Ziploc bag her father had wedged under the wheel well. She jammed it into her handbag. She reminded herself that Poppa would have all the answers. From beneath the rear seat, she pulled out a small Camelbak used for occasional hikes in the Red Rock mountains. The backpack was a gift from Justine, a girl who failed to impress her with obviously You-Tubed outdoor skills. They tried to connect, but Poppa vetted Justine in one heated conversation, and they never recovered.

Jessie donned a Las Vegas Raiders ballcap, then pulled on a purple lace shirt, the sleeves still rolled up and the midriff knotted from the outing with Justine. The hike home was doable. She was in great shape, averaging twelve thousand steps a day. Six miles. Not that far, straight up Flamingo and she would be home. She searched for the phone in her bag to google a shorter, alternate route, then closed her eyes and shook her head, her fingertips stroking the warm glass. The phones were the key, or the problem.

Jessie put on the Camelbak and merged with a procession of dirty construction workers still wearing toolbelts, dangling heavy hammers and coils of thin wire, tired and weary faces reminding her of Poppa after he finished a late-night concrete pour for a high-rise office building. The stout hardhat crew crowded her, and she waited for the inevitable ass-grabbing and accidental booby grabs. The workers pushed by, quiet, wafting of sweat and hard labor. And the phones, always the phones.

Find the crew boss, the old man. He probably has daughters your age and will protect you.

Poppa’s words of wisdom.

Jessie fell in behind an older man wearing a hard hat proud with Union 159 stickers, yellow smiley faces, and a giant middle finger. His brown leathery face sprouted a thin moustache and he stared at the oversized screen of an Android smartphone. Jessie adjusted her pack and peered over the man’s shoulder at the phone.

Burgundy wine and azure, bursts of turquoise, amazing eruptions of burning sunsets, deep ocean violets, cool breezes, and soothing ocean surf. The gorgeous colors and sounds exuded happiness and euphoria. A hard-hat worker bumped her arm from behind, jarring her fixation with the phone. She stepped aside and let the protector